


in the world above the sky

by waterpots



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: F/F, Post-Apocalypse, Science Fiction, it's kinda like.....lets go live in space bc the earth got fucked up lmfaooo, it's like it kinda is, oh god i forgot how i use tags i feel so bad for anyone reading this i'm sorry, sorry that's a really menacing tag it's not that big of a deal, u know - Freeform, y - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-12 22:33:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17476190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterpots/pseuds/waterpots
Summary: the 19th base circles around the earth, sometimes sending in small teams to extract materials and resources from its surface (drabbles centering around interpersonal relationships)





	1. Chapter 1

Jinsol’s eyes are brighter than stars, and her smile more powerful than the sun. That’s what Hyunjin decides. She’s watching Jinsol while tapping her foot in time to a rhythm, one she’s subconsciously pulling from the music blasting from Jiwoo’s headphones. It’s been two weeks that Jinsol’s been gone. Hyunjin didn’t mind it at the time. Now that she was looking at Jinsol, watching her catch up with Jungeun and Yerim, Hyunjin realizes that everything was odd without her here. Not wrong, not different, just off. Something had been missing, but its absence didn’t disrupt the flow of Hyunjin’s daily life.

 Jiwoo’s music changes, and now Hyunjin’s foot rhythm is all wrong. She tries to ignore the music and calm down her foot. She’s supposed to be _working_ right now. Haseul sent her in here to deal with some final paperwork before they turn in their mission statement, and she should be working. They both should be, but Jiwoo listens to music while she works, old records she’s picked up and transferred to her reader using a machine that Jinsol and Yerim had somehow gotten back in working order.

 Jinsol’s explaining something that happened back while she was on the colony, Hyunjin can tell that much. She’s moving weird, and Yerim and Jungeun are laughing. She probably made a fool of herself, somehow. Hyunjin smiles, only a tiny bit. Not enough for anybody to notice. Jinsol does, of course she does, and she grins widely at Hyunjin in a way that makes her stomach do flips. Hyunjin looks back down at her paperwork. She has to get back to work.

 When Hyunjin is leaving, after she’s finally focused long enough to finish the paperwork, Jinsol grabs her arm. Hyunjin should protest: she’s got to turn this in before the end of the day, and Haseul needed to talk to her after she was done. They’re leaving at the end of the month after all, to get more supplies and do some readings on the ground. She’s busy. But Jinsol’s smiling at her and telling her stories, dragging her to her living quarters (she smuggled food back, it turns out), and Hyunjin doesn’t even try and formulate words. Everything has slid back into place, and work can wait.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yerm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm playing around with the scenario i have built. silly me. also orb is a coincidence more or less. sorry that it's kinda cringey

Yerim had been the youngest person to join the Orbital Recon Battalion, and she had always been proud of it. It had been a point of contention, when the school had first told her she was moving into the ORB specialization Academy, or when she graduated. She hadn’t exactly been excelling academically, but the instructors told her she had something called _potential_. Yerim didn’t know what that potential meant.

 She was good at mock field missions, good at finding and extracting seeds from plants, good at figuring out how the hell the spaceships worked. She still bombed half her tests, and god knows how many times on mock field missions she extracted nightshade seeds along with cherry ones, but she had potential. That’s what the teachers said. Perhaps potential is why not many people talked to her at the Academy (or perhaps being two years younger than the next youngest person could also do that to you). Perhaps potential is why she was called into the offices after only a year at the Academy and was told she would be part of the next graduating batch.

 And perhaps potential is why Jungeun had grinned at Yerim when she first arrived at the base, greeting her formally before remarking. “The second we looked at the graduating recruit batch I told Haseul we had to grab you.” She’s leading Yerim to the living quarters. “She’s kind of annoyed that she’s got the only two member squadron now, but her and Hyunjin are pros at this kind of thing anyway.”

 Yerim doesn’t know what Jungeun sees in her, but she decides she doesn’t plan on disappointing her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jwoowoowoo

Jungeun had wanted to see the world. It was all she talked about, to the point she had to apologize to Jiwoo, back when they had first started school together. She had a single-minded focus on travelling to Earth. The colony was a stifling place to be, Jiwoo knew that. There was something about looking out the windows to see only the vast expanse of space that, even though it was all Jiwoo had known her whole life, felt wrong to her. 

Jungeun sought to change that. She wanted to head down to Earth, to see buildings and trees and nature, to free herself from the suffocation the walls of the colony brought. Being on Earth would make Jungeun feel grounded in a way she hadn’t on the colony. Jiwoo understood that.

They parted ways when they went into their specializations. Jungeun into the ORB Academy, and Jiwoo wanted to learn about plants. She wanted to work back home in the Artificial Gardens. And she did, for a few years, after a tearful goodbye when Jungeun got on the spaceship to see the world.

Jiwoo was happy working, growing plants and trying to figure out just what the temperature coffee grows at is (they found a book on coffee from Earth, and the archival library was working at filling in the pages that were missing or destroyed from water damage). She was happy. Until she wasn’t, realizing one day she when had mistaken the screens on the wall that display a recreation of the Earth’s landscape in the Artificial Gardens for the real thing.

And so, although she was a bit late, Jiwoo made her way through the ORB Academy. The look on Jungeun’s face when Haseul introduced her after she got placed with the 19th base made the whole thing worth it, though.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yves

Sooyoung wasn’t supposed to be part of their unit. It was an early injury that placed her there. And initially she had resented it. Haseul wasn’t captain yet, and the current captain had had no idea what to do with her. Sooyoung had been part of the Exploration Corps, trying to find a new planet they could potentially settle on in case it turned out that Earth was beyond foreseeable repair. 

Sooyoung changed her story on the injury every time someone asked. She had been pushed off a cliff by jealous crew member. She sustained injury in a battle with a foreign lifeform. The masked man who killed her (very much alive) parents had given it to her in their final battle, where she proudly bested him. Sometimes comical, sometimes serious, always a lie.

Haseul knew that.

Sooyoung ate alone. The satellite still had a mess hall, but there weren’t more than 20 of them, so they would tend to eat in the common areas, or crowd around one table in the mess hall. Even then they were downsizing ORB, automating more than half of the jobs. Sooyoung knew that it meant she was never returning to her old job. She was stuck here, so she ate alone.

“You know you can talk about it,” Haseul said. She had taken to sitting across from her, away from everyone else in the isolated spot of the large mess hall Sooyoung had chosen for herself. The captain tried to dissuade Haseul, but she ignored his warning. Sooyoung, for the most part, tried to ignore her. At first she shooed Haseul away, either verbally or by trying to ice her out. Haseul learned to ignore this too.

“I know,” Sooyoung said. She had given up on trying to get rid of her.

“We’re the same age, you know,” Haseul said.

“I know.”

“How?”

“Gave me a debrief on everyone at the base when I came here.”

Haseul opened her mouth as if to say something else, but decided against it, focusing on the oatmeal in front of her. Sooyoung, silently, was grateful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's like....a whole story i'm drafting out that goes along with this....which is why things feel very open ended it's more just establishing shots than.....a plot.....lol


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> zeep zorp gowon

It’s Chaewon, of all people, who gets Sooyoung to open up. Nobody saw it coming, least of all Sooyoung herself, that the small, soft-spoken girl who had taken 3 extra years to make it through the ORB training would get past Sooyoung’s shell.

Haseul, too, certainly wasn’t expecting it. Their crew consisted of two ground teams back then, Jungeun leading a team with Jinsoul and the until-then newest member Jiwoo, and Haseul leading a team with Hyunjin and, now, Chaewon. Haseul and Jungeun both asked Sooyoung, every time they were set to go down on a mission, if she’d like to join their team. Sooyoung always said no.

“Don’t bother,” Sooyoung had heard Jiwoo say, in a voice that might have passed for a whisper. She should have known then that there would be trouble.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Jungeun wouldn’t tell me. She was like that when Jungeun came though, I guess.” Sooyoung took then to glare at them. They could at least have the decency to have this conversation away from her. Jiwoo grinned sheepishly, because deep down they both knew Sooyoung wasn’t going to actually do with them, and Chaewon just stared at her. Sooyoung didn’t like that she could see gears turning in her head. She left before Chaewon could say something.

Chaewon finds her though, after dinner, because Sooyoung chose not to eat dinner and instead hole up in her room, trying to steer clear of any conversation the two new crew members could have near her. She’s holding a bowl in her hand, standing rigidly in the hallway when Sooyoung finally lets the door open.

“I got you this,” Chaewon says.

“What is it?”

“Chicken stock. They said it was ‘good for the soul’ back on Earth.” Sooyoung stares at it. “I can just leave it.”

“It’s fine,” Sooyoung steps aside. “Come in.” Sooyoung gestures for Chaewon to take a seat in the desk chair in her room, and takes the bowl from her.

“It was chicken soup, actually,” Chaewon says. “But we don’t exactly have chickens, so I did the best I could. I guess I could have put vegetables in there, but I didn’t think to.” Sooyoung nods, staring at the soup.

“Sorry if it’s out of line.”

“It’s fine.”

Sooyoung takes a sip.

“You’re making a face.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“There was no salt in the stock cube.” Sooyoung makes another face. “They used to call it a bouillon cube, back on Earth.”

“Bouillon?”

Chaewon nods. “French.” Sooyoung just hums.

“This is not good,” Sooyoung says.

“I brought salt.”

“I don’t think that will help.”

“Damn.”

“Thank you, though,” Sooyoung says after a moment. Chaewon looks pleased with herself. Almost too pleased, considering that she hadn’t made something that actually tasted good. “They didn’t expect me to try it, did they?”

“They didn’t think you’d let me through the door,” Chaewon replies. Sooyoung nods. “I can tell them you didn’t, if you’d like.”

“No need.”

“We could make hot chocolate too. That’s also supposed to help the soul,” Chaewon says. “I’m not really sure what it consists of, but we’ve got cocoa powder in the mess hall.” Sooyoung, despite herself, agrees.

They don’t make hot chocolate right. That, or Sooyoung decides back on Earth humans had a penchant for self-flagellation. But the next morning Sooyoung makes the drastically different decision of sitting next to Chaewon during breakfast and asking how she slept. Hyunjin looks aghast, Jinsol looks the most awake she ever has in the morning, and the force of Jiwoo’s jabs into Chaewon’s side means that Chaewon is rocking into Sooyoung. Worst of all, Haseul looks absolutely thrilled. Sooyoung hates it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> haseul :3c

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the order they join the base as an i don't know what i'm doing moment...also their age differences are relatively the same but if it weren't obvious it's not like. a direct correlation....so haseul is older than hyunjin but not necessarily by 3 years and by the 1 year difference between hyunjin and choerry and so on and so forth
> 
> haseul--yves--hyunjin--kim lip--jinsoul--chuu--gowon--choerry

They had a different group of people running the 19th base back when Haseul first met Hyunjin. They used to need more people on each base back then, before they had learned to automate testing for most things extracted from the planet. Haseul had been part of the science team on the base originally, having to painstakingly test the chemical levels of everything they brought back before it could be sent to the colony.

Hyunjin was part of the ground forces. She was young, eager to prove herself, and very, very uncomfortable. Haseul remembers asking her one day, while they were eating dinner, if she missed home.

“This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” Hyunjin said confidently. It hadn’t been an answer, and they both knew that. Haseul decided not to push her on it. Sooyoung did.

“We both hear you crying every night,” Sooyoung said simply. She didn’t want to sit with Hyunjin and Haseul, but Haseul sat beside her every single day and dragged Hyunjin every single time. Sooyoung got sick of telling them to leave.

“Are you guys happy here?” Hyunjin asked. Sooyoung gave her a look, and Hyunjin turned her attention on Haseul.

“Very.”

“Analyzing radioactivity samples all the time?”

“Haseul is here to mother everyone and be a nuisance,” Sooyoung said. “She probably just mothers the radioactivity out of everything.”

“I’m where I’m supposed to be,” Haseul says, ignoring Sooyoung.

“Fine, keep your secrets,” Hyunjin huffs. Sooyoung wrinkles her nose at Haseul response and goes back to eating her soup. Haseul only smiles. “I think I’m where I’m supposed to be too,” Hyunjin says.

Months later, when the captain is retiring (or relocating. He said retiring but Haseul honestly isn’t sure anymore), choosing Haseul as his successor, she enters Hyunjin’s room in a panicked state. She’s never exactly been down to Earth before, but you can’t be the captain of a base and not travel down with the expedition teams. Hyunjin, far more comfortable now than she was when she entered the base, laughs and spends the next two weeks painstakingly explaining every step of a ground expedition.

Once they’re on Earth and Haseul watches Hyunjin in her element, walking around in the radiation-safe spacesuits they have as if she were walking around on the colony, Haseul decides she agrees that Hyunjin is where she’s supposed to be too. She doesn’t get mad when Hyunjin puts a bug in front of her visor and Haseul panics. Well, she doesn’t get too mad.

**Author's Note:**

> so.....i'm working through the worldbuilding by writing this. sorry if u don't follow what is happening....i would b happy 2 answer any question :-)


End file.
